The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week: July 3

Prison Isn't Painless

How dumb do you have to be to fake your own death to escape prison and then turn yourself in anyway?

That would be as dumb as hedge fund manager Samuel Israel. The 48-year-old convicted swindler turned himself in Wednesday after being on the lam for all of a month.

In April, the crooked character was found guilty of bilking investors out of more than $450 million in an elaborate ponzi-style scheme.

He was supposed to turn himself in June 9.

Instead, he decided to fake his own suicide by abandoning his GMC Envoy and scrawling "Suicide is Painless" in the dust on the front of the car.

With nearly half a billion dollars, suspected to be stashed in various locations around the world, you'd have thought he would be a little more imaginative.

Maybe he believed everyone could be as easily fooled as his unfortunate investors.

Didn't he think police would look for a body? Certainly, pushing the car into the rapids would have been a better ruse, or maybe some elaborate pyrotechnics that might have kept the CSI folks busy long enough for him to make it out of the country.

Instead, he got only about a half-day's highway driving up the coast to Massachusetts after leaving his car in New York state next to a Hudson River bridge.

After all that time, he surfaced in Southwick, Mass., this week to start serving his 20-year prison sentence.

Maybe that term will get a bit longer.

Judges don't like when you fail to show up.

Dumb-o-meter score: 80. Whether or not suicide is painless, there's not much dispute that prison isn't.